For 40 years — from 1930 until retiring in 1970 — Cora Hortense Ball spent her days in the classroom enlightening junior high students on the finer points of math and English.

But at night and on weekends, the demure woman often would assume a completely different persona, transforming into the great American poet Edgar Allan Poe.

To add authenticity during those occasions, she would dress for the part and add a full moustache, painstakingly made from her own hair.

Although Ball died in 1986 at age 81, the memory of her spell-bounding performances remain vivid.

One of those performance came during spring 1970 in the Estacado Junior High gym. Never breaking character during the 30-minute performance, she gave many of those students their first taste of such classics as “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee” and “The Bells.” Only later did we learn that the older gentleman who had given such a passionate performance actually was our demure female math teacher.

Speaking to Herald woman’s editor Myrna Smith in 1972, Ball said her strong fascination with Poe’s verse and pose began while she was in high school. That also was about the time that she fell in love with drama and the stage.

As a youth she seriously considered a career on stage, but her mother waged a constant battle against that because she considered such an idea “terrible.”

Instead, Ball explained, “Mother thought teaching was the only job a young girl should have.” As a result, Ball taught in Texas public schools for 40 years before retiring in 1970. She finished high school when she was 15.

But as a youth she still was able to experience life as an actor, over her mother’s objections. Ball said she managed to travel on a Chautauqua circuit in South Texas during the summer months and later was a Little Theater actress. While on the Chautauqua tour, her troupe wrote and performed plays from various Poe stories.

Ball received bachelor and master degrees from Hardin-Simmons University with English and math as her teaching fields. She taught in Plainview junior high schools — both Coronado and Estacado — for 18 years.

She and her husband, Clem Ernest Ball, were married in 1923 in Hamlin. He worked as a telegrapher for Santa Fe Railway for 50 years. He died in 1983.

It was while the couple was living in Hamlin that Ball got her first job as a teacher, after the principal learned that she could give book reviews. She also taught in Knox City.

When she wasn’t in the classroom, Ball would travel within a 100-mile radius of those two towns, giving reviews and programs on Poe’s poetry. When they moved to Plainview in 1952, her husband expressed hopes that no one would find out about her unusual talents.

They did, however, and she continued to give programs and reviews, and he eventually reconciled and helped her with costuming and getting into character.

When Ball first embarked on her Poe presentations in 1930, they often would last for two hours. In time she was able to condense her performances down to about 30 minutes.

Whether in front of a school assembly or a study club, Ball always followed the same routine. She would arrive costumed and in character, and stay out of sight of her audience until the program began. Often when she arrived even the hostess would have trouble recognizing her.

Once she took the stage, the audience would see and hear only Poe — the well-educated and lonely poet and prose writer who knew poverty, drugs and alcohol much better than financial success.

Reciting lines from “Lenore,” “El Dorado,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” and others, she would realistically portray Poe’s moody disposition, extreme sensitivity and remorse. Smith wrote that imaginations would soar “with every line as the haunting rhythm of the poet’s melodic words brought into focus the mystic, morbid themes of man’s loneliness, hopelessness of struggle, birds of ill omen, ghosts and crawling shapes.”

In an effort to share her love of Poe with the blind and others who were unable to read, in the decade before she died Ball made recordings of her book and play condensations. She also spent almost 50 years writing chapter after chapter of a special book for her family, titled “Memories.”